In my view, Framework’s laptops provides light & thin, with moderate performance user experience. What I want most for these kind of laptops is long battery life cause I don’t need them to be powerful, to handle heavy tasks, but I need them to be available for most of the time.
But again, longer battery life means larger battery size, larger battery size leads to compact motherboard, and compact motherboard have to sacrifice some expansion capability. For example, on DELL XPS, if you choose a larger battery version, you would lose an m.2 slot. The current design of Framework looks tight enough for me, so I guess the long battery version requires a new and compact mother board design which may go against right to repair.
I was a Macbook pro 2015 user, it’s performance and battery life meets my need. However, it’s 8G memory, which I can’t upgrade, is such a pain. I guess Macbook’s compact design giving it a longer battery life.
Back to the question, will there be a long battery life version? I sincerely hope Framework could build something with, say 70Wh battery, while keeping all the magnificent design.
I could see the draw of incorporating a larger 99Wh battery that would fit in a more square profile chassis, but I’m not sure if that would be the right move for right now. With the prevalence of very compact external battery packs a large portion of the market might have less need for that (I’m making this statement off of pure conjecture. Dissent is welcome). What might be more doable is a battery pack that clips onto the back bottom of the chassis to provide extra power externally. You could have it lock in with an expansion card form factor on both sides of the device, and have space to spare for a couple USB ports for select peripherals.
Looked at the Line.dock, and it seems really cool. I can’t get past the price though, that seems astronomical to me
Of course, you’re paying for a certain degree of fit and finish, but for the cost of a decent starter laptop… I think I’d personally rather go with separating the battery pack and USB-C dock, it’s not an overstatement to say it would be half the total cost. Not knocking on the Line.dock or users of it, I’m just in a different budget.
I totally agree on the pricing of the Line.dock being a little “out of line” (coughbad puncough).
I think part of the trouble they’ve had was getting a little ambitious with trying to engineer a high-speed hub/dock + battery and not realizing the challenges of getting video signals and USB3 and M.2 SATA frequencies across “long” distances so they spent a ton of engineering hours on that. Their 15" unit was going to include a Peltier cooler as well which just added to the complexity (and high heat + batteries is scary, but if the bottom of the laptop is getting cooled, the heat has to go somewhere).
If it was literally just a battery w/USB-C + USB-A for accessories/phones in the slim “under laptop” form factor without storage or a hub I’d be happy to pay the average or even slightly above the $/Wh rate for a good looking charger that doesn’t make a huge lump in my bag.
As it is the 13" model really only provides output useful for a Macbook Air (or maybe the new M1 version) or other 45w systems, when I’ve tried to use it on a laptop that came with a 65w power adapter it has struggled, I’ll be curious to see if it is that way with the Framework as well.
80-90Wh battery + 13.5"/15.5"FHD + i5 will fit most of the users.
Currently the laptops in the market are either have poor battery life or quite expensive. Most of the users don’t need very powerful laptop, but all need good battery for the whole day. 55Wh is not enough, especially considering it will lose capacity overtime.
I will continue to repeat this until it is a reality: I desperately want a ~99Wh battery on the marketplace, and I’m more than willing to remove both speakers to fit it. I’m certain others would be, too.
I agree about the 99+Wh battery. I think speakers are just in a really bad place in the framework laptop and that they should be moved up with the keyboard. This would allow a larger battery, and would allow us to hear the speakers better.
So are the other posters here suggesting a forward firing speaker set thats embedded in the top piece, rather than inside next to the battery, downfiring? That does seem superior for both space in the laptop and sound quality. If there’s space enough to do it of course.
@ERLindeman The biggest battery I can see fitting in a 13.5-14.5 inch chassis is a 76Wh like in the Asus Zephyrus G14.
Even a slight improvement in battery chemistry would only bump that up by 5% to 80Wh.
I do forsee solid state batteries coming to Framework devices in 5-7 years though which will easily double or even triple capacity while at least halving charging times.
